As with most things electronic, there is a desire to continually make computers smaller and smaller, or in other words, to put the same or a greater amount of computing power within a given amount of space. As a part of this process, blade computing designs were developed.
Blade designs put some aspects of a computer on a card (referred to as a blade) that is inserted into an enclosure (also referred to as a chassis), where the chassis provides other aspects of the computer. Typically, the chassis is designed to accommodate several blades, such as four, eight, nine, sixteen, etc. The chassis typically provides elements of the system that can be commonly used for all of the blades in the system, which elements might be unnecessarily redundant if these elements were individually provided by each of the blades.
For example, power supply, cooling, and network or bus communications are typically provided by the chassis. These services might be provided in a redundant manner, but are provided in a manner that reliability and uptime are enhanced without unnecessarily providing duplicated services. The blade portion of the design is removable from the chassis and can be replaced or augmented, typically without powering down or otherwise taking the other blades off-line.
The blade computing design can be applied to different aspects of a computing system. For example, computers themselves can be configured into a blade design, where each blade in the system provides computing power with memory and a central processing unit. The blade concept can also be applied to data storage, with devices called storage blades or, alternately, drive blades. Storage blades typically hold some number of individual hard drives, such as two, four, seven, eight, etc.
Because of the delicate nature of hard drives, they generally must be handled very carefully while they are spinning, and also at other times. Thus, it tends to be important for the blade to mate smoothly and firmly with the chassis, and for insertion and removal of the blade to be accomplished without damaging the blade or chassis components. However, providing for such blade handling can be very expensive.
What is needed, therefore, is a system that overcomes problems such as those described above, at least in part.